Home

This past week I went back home to let my mom watch the kids for a bit. I was overwhelmed by the beauty of this place, the fall colors, and the memories that flooded my senses. I remembered hours of laying on the sunporch attempting to get a tan, after dinner basketball games, playing in the forests, and discovering an old junkyard and the treasures that a five year old's fingers found.I remember when this shed was brought out to our house shortly before the boat arrived that was meant to fill it. I have a scar barely visible on the back of my left knee from the rooster who lived in the chicken house behind this shed.I remember when Travis and I burned down the chicken house two years ago and buried the remains with a backhoe. I remember raking endless piles of leaves, and swinging from the rope swing into them. I remember having to pick up the sticks throughout our yard after a wind storm because my parents always wanted our house and yard to look nice.
I remember Autumns so beautiful I wrote in my journal that this would be the thing I missed most when I went to college. I remember my mom taking my brother out to the MTC and his two high school buddies watching my sister, two brothers, and I for a week. I remember the buddy, AJ, left his car parked on the hill and it rolled down the hill, crashed through the fence and fell into the creek. I remember skipping school that week and going to the batting cages to play ball, and my little brother, James, getting a spider bite on his lip that made it swell to four times its normal size.

I remember many hours standing over the burn pit watching for the flame to die entirely before leaving it so we didn't start a forest fire, and I remember a time or two when we did start one and scrambling to put them out. I remember many ward activities at our house, countless open houses, and family gatherings. And I remember being awakened by a fireman in the middle of the night because we had a chimney fire and they had come and were shocked to find me sleeping right through the fire alarm.

I remember so much about this house, this yard, but most of all I remember it is home. And it doesn't matter that I'm almost thirty, have been away for eleven years, married for nine, have four kids of my own, and two houses of my own when I think of home more often than not I am thinking of this place.